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mysociety / alaveteli-experiments

A collection of experiments and research to learn about what makes an Alaveteli grow
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Analyse inbound links to each gold site #4

Closed garethrees closed 8 years ago

garethrees commented 8 years ago

Where else on the web are potential Alaveteli users?

garethrees commented 8 years ago
lizconlan commented 8 years ago

Splitting this into 2 pages - one for referrers an one for inbound links otherwise no-one's going to want to wade through it

garethrees commented 8 years ago

one for referrers an one for inbound links otherwise no-one's going to want to wade through it

The raw data can live in separate csv files – the .md file can just be a summary of the results. Might make more sense to have a single summary for essentially the same question?

lizconlan commented 8 years ago

There's no sane conclusion other than the tabular data

lizconlan commented 8 years ago

And they answer different questions - where are people arriving from? (referrals) and where is there a high density of signposts? (inbound links). Bonus points for crossovers of course.

garethrees commented 8 years ago

where are people arriving from? (referrals) and where is there a high density of signposts? (inbound links)

In that sense, yes, but that's a bit of a technical detail. What I think site admins are interested in are "where are people who care about my site, and am I connecting with them well?"

There's no sane conclusion other than the tabular data

I'm keen that we give people as much actionable guidance in these write-ups as possible.

So given the repositioning of the question and looking at the inbound links I'd say that you can bet that if you put some effort in to Facebook you'll get some return.

AskTheEU has a good portion of traffic from EU-focused sites, which is also interesting. They've done a good job at finding the groups that are likely to ask questions or finding the existing information useful. You see that the links found by majestic on alter-eu.org are working because its their 4th best traffic source recently. Conversely, it doesn't look like they're actually getting much traffic from independencyproject.org even though it has the most links, so might not be worth additional effort to publicise there over other channels.

You can see some evidence of this in WDTK too (thestudentroom.co.uk) where we've connected with a specific group of people. You can see this working by filtering the pages viewed by the source. There's definite interest in "university stuff" from people who've found us via thestudentroom.co.uk:

screen shot 2016-05-06 at 15 58 49

The Australians get a nice amount of traffic from the Guardian, but they don't seem to have too many links from them. Maybe that would be a good place to push interesting requests.

The raw data is indeed interesting, but I think the analysis of that data across multiple installs and provide suggestions on what to do is what we're in a good position to do.